The Haunted Kitchen
For the women of the sixties and seventies the kitchen was a fraught and spectral space. Post 9/11 there is a return--although in a haunted and fractured manner--to the devilish space of the domestic. This paper explores this spooky culinary locale.

Don Draper is a man with secrets, haunted by his past self and living a double life as husband and lover. The haunting of Don Draper exemplifies Mad Men’s insight into the threshold between a materially grounded realism and the imaginative room-for-play that Walter Benjamin found in technological media including advertising and film. With Don as its creative genius, advertising functions as a kind of gothic castle in which desire opens the unpredictable doors of history in the 1960s.

Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Eudora Welty's "Where is the Voice Coming From?" take us to hot places and dark violence, haunting the national narrative in this season of commemoration. As we mark fifty years since those early struggles for Civil Rights and the murder of Medgar Evers, we are confronted with the persistent problem of articulation and restless spirits. Tensions relating to authority, memory, and fear continue to haunt the landscape of race and sexuality.